In this chapter from Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 Step by Step, you will record different types of information in your Outlook calendar, scheduling an appointment and an event on your own calendar and then scheduling a meeting with another person. You will learn methods of determining meeting times during which other people are available. Then you will learn about responding to, updating, and canceling meeting requests.

You might find that your Microsoft Office Outlook Calendar runs your life—but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Using the Calendar effectively can help you to stay organized, on task, and on time. You can schedule and track appointments, meetings, and events. Because Outlook 2007 maps your scheduled tasks to your calendar, you can look at your calendar in Day view or Week view to see the tasks that need to be completed that day or that week, and you can track your progress by marking tasks as complete when you finish them.

In this chapter, you will record different types of information in your Outlook calendar, scheduling an appointment and an event on your own calendar and then scheduling a meeting with another person. You will learn methods of determining meeting times during which other people are available. Then you will learn about responding to, updating, and canceling meeting requests.

Note

See Also Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference section at the beginning of this book.

Warning

Important
No practice files are required to complete the exercises in this chapter. For more information about practice files, see Using the Companion CD at the beginning of this book.

Working in the Calendar Item Windows

We refer to the window in which you create or respond to an appointment as the appointment window, to a meeting as the meeting window, and to an event as the event window; collectively we refer to these windows as the calendar item windows. Like the contact and message windows, the calendar item windows contain their own commands, arranged on the new Office Ribbon instead of on menus and toolbars.

Note

See Also For more information about the user interface for Outlook 2007 item windows, see Working in the Contact Window in Chapter 2.

In this exercise, you will take a tour of the calendar item window elements that differ from the contact and message window elements discussed in earlier chapters, and you’ll learn about the differences between the types of calendar items. There are no practice files for this exercise.

Note

BE SURE TO start Outlook before beginning this exercise.

In the Navigation Pane, click the Calendar button to display the Calendar module.

Troubleshooting Graphics and operating system–related instructions in this book reflect the Windows Vista user interface. If your computer is running Windows XP and you experience trouble following the instructions as written, please refer to the Information for Readers Running Windows XP section at the beginning of this book.

Important
Depending on your screen resolution and the size of the appointment window that opens, you might see more or fewer buttons in each of the groups, or the buttons you see might be represented by larger or smaller icons than those shown in this book. Experiment with the size of the appointment window to understand the effect on the appearance of the Ribbon.

Note

See Also For more information about the tabs and groups on the Ribbon, see Working in the Contact Window in Chapter 2.

In the upper-left corner of the window, click the Microsoft Office Button.

Commands related to managing appointments (such as creating, saving, deleting, and printing) are available from the Office menu that appears.

See Also For information about the Print commands, see Printing Messages in Chapter 4. For information about the commands available in the Editor Options window, see Personalizing Your Office and Outlook Settings in Chapter 12.

Click away from the Office menu to close it.

The appointment window commands are organized in groups on three tabs:

Appointment

Insert

Format Text

TIP

Depending on what programs you have installed on your computer, tabs and groups other than those described here might also appear on the Ribbon. For example, if Microsoft Office OneNote is installed on your computer, a OneNote group appears on the Appointment tab.

The Appointment tab is active by default. Buttons representing commands related to creating appointments are organized on this tab in four groups: Actions, Show, Options, and Proofing. You can create a simple appointment by using only the commands available on this tab.

Buttons representing commands related to the appearance of message content are organized on this tab in six groups: Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, Zoom, and Editing.

On the Appointment tab, in the Options group, click the Time Zones button.

A new field displaying the time zone for each of the start and end times appears. With this useful Outlook 2007 feature, you can schedule an appointment that crosses time zones—for example, a flight from Los Angeles to New York.

Note

See Also For more information about configuring Outlook for different time zones, see Configuring Outlook for Multiple Time Zones in Chapter 7.

The Event tab contents are nearly identical to the Appointment tab contents—the only change is that on the Event tab, in the Options group, by default your time is shown as Free rather than Busy, and the reminder is set to display 18 hours prior to the event rather than 15 minutes.

In the Start time area, clear the All day event check box to change the event to an appointment.

In the Actions group, click the Invite Attendees button.

The window changes from an appointment window to a meeting window. The contents of the Format Text and Insert tabs don’t change, but a Meeting tab that includes one additional group, Attendees, replaces the Appointment tab:

You can invite people to an event in the same way you do to a meeting, by clicking the Invite Attendees button from within an event window.

The meeting request header includes a To field in addition to the standard Subject and Location fields. You can invite attendees by entering them in the To field or by clicking the Scheduling button in the Show group.

Note

BE SURE TO click the Time Zones button to hide the time zone settings, if you don’t want to display them.